Applications are strategic business assets and the lifeblood of data centers, and the

Best-In-Class Partners

primary role of IT operators is to ensure that applications are at all times available, fast, and secure. In order to achieve this, businesses rely on network-based services which can include basic security to sophisticated threat prevention, load balancing to assure delivery of applications, and services that allow physical and virtual resources to be consistently managed.

When we developed VMware NSX™, we recognized that customers had made huge investments in application infrastructure including networking services, which served as the foundational components of their IT infrastructure.  We architected the VMware NSX network virtualization platform in a way that ensures the services we offer on NSX virtual networks deliver next generation functionality, and are also as co-existent, transparent, and effective as those deployed on physical networks.

Applications and platforms have a symbiotic relationship. Platforms enable application and service innovation, and new applications and services from partners enrich the platform – increasing the utility and value of both to customers.  For this reason, we developed VMware NSX as an extensible platform that leverages a distributed service framework for easy insertion of partner services. This framework allows service composition at multiple points in the virtual network. Using a standard NSX API we expose platform capabilities to our partners and make it possible for them to consume the network through a single API rather than having to use multiple APIs to access network functions. The NSX API allows our partners to integrate into management, data and control planes, and to augment the core capabilities of VMware NSX including logical firewall, load balancing, VPN, switching, routing, etc. Customers are able to draw from a broad ecosystem of best-of-breed solutions that seamlessly integrate into any cloud management system and are guaranteed a consistent user experience.

Our partner ecosystem covers the portfolio of applications customers require to implement the network virtualization lifecycle, and includes: network service gateways to bridge physical and virtual environments, network security platforms that provide multiple services such as firewall and threat prevention, security services including anti-virus, IDS/IPS and vulnerability management and application delivery services including load balancing, application delivery and WAN optimization.

Our objective with VMware NSX extensibility is to realize the promise of NSX itself – empowering customers to speed the rate of innovation for faster network provisioning, flexible workload placement and mobility, and reduced complexity – all resulting in better, faster, and cheaper IT services. As a testament to its capabilities, we leveraged VMware NSX ,over a three months period, as a core part of the cloud service we used to setup, train, test, certify and showcase half a dozen partner integrations from separate vendors all running simultaneously.

We remain committed to offering our customers choice and flexibility in the solutions that help them to optimize their virtual networks.  We are confident that VMware NSX extensibility and the on-going partner integrations will continue to drive customer-centric solutions.

At VMworld, we celebrated the launch of VMware NSX with our partner ecosystem.  Read what they had to say below.

Hatem Naguib, Vice President, Cloud Networking and Security

“Virtualization has allowed organizations to become more agile and efficient with their compute infrastructure.  Traditional network security solutions cannot provide the same scalability and protection that is needed in this agile environment. Alert Logic’s Threat Manager support for VMware NSX™ will allow organizations to deploy network security efficiently across a VMware virtualized network environment to enhance the security and compliance.” – Dave Colesante, senior vice president of product development and CTO, Alert Logic. Read Alert Logic’s Announcement

“Arista’s EOS continues to outpace the industry with Software Defined Networking (SDN) innovations, exposing innovative network applications and delivering a set of advanced SDN capabilities that support programmatic control, enhanced monitoring, and self-healing resilience. The architecture of Arista EOS, coupled with best-in-class hardware and partnerships with the other best-of-breed companies in each category creates network capabilities unachievable by monolithic providers.  The integration and demonstration of VMware NSX with EOS at VMworld is a clear example of this best in class partnership.” – Anshul Sadana, Senior Vice President, Customer Engineering, Arista Networks. Read Arista’s Announcement

“VMware and Brocade share a common vision of delivering a highly automated and efficient cloud-optimized data center network architecture to enable business agility and increase innovation. As a proud member of the NSX partner ecosystem, we are pleased to announce the Brocade® VCS® for VMware NSX™ solution as an essential element of unifying virtual and physical networking to ensure customers have a holistic solution for their data center network.” – Jason Nolet, vice president data center switching and routing, Brocade. Read Brocade’s Announcement

“Catbird vSecurity with combined with VMware NSX™ assures security and compliance for businesses transitioning to network virtualization. vSecurity provides one-click deployment of a wide variety of technical controls pre-bundled and preconfigured to monitor and enforce compliance in data centers. Together, vSecurity and VMware NSX enable customers to focus on business operations and growth rather than integrating, validating and managing their IT infrastructure. vSecurity gives customers the assurance that their VMware environments are audit-ready.” – Edmundo Costa, CEO, Catbird. Read Catbird’s Announcement

“Openness, programmability and automation are the core tenants of a cloud networking architecture.  We are excited to collaborate with VMware to seamlessly integrate NetScaler services into networks built using the VMware NSX network virtualization platform.” – Sunil Potti, Vice President and General Manager, NetScaler Product Group, Citrix. Read Citrix’s Announcement

“With VMware NSX™ integration, we are helping to drive the networking industry forward with flexible, affordable solutions that adapt to our customer needs. Building on the incredible response we’ve had with Cumulus Linux, we are excited to bring this latest iteration to our customers and provide them with even faster, simpler, and more cost effective networking.” – JR Rivers, co-founder and CEO, Cumulus Networks. Read Cumulus’ Announcement

“Network virtualization is critical to customers looking to modernize their data center connectivity through programmability and advanced automation. In developing the Dell Networking S6000, we worked closely with VMware to deliver a high performance gateway that integrates with VMware NSX™ that allows customers the flexibility to unify pools of virtualized and non-virtualized IT assets.” – Arpit Joshipura, vice president, Dell Networking Product Management.

“F5 supports a broad range of VMware solutions, including network virtualization technologies such as VMware NSX™ and SDN-focused offerings technologies such as VXLAN. As a longstanding technology partner with a solid history of integration and collaboration, we’re in lockstep with VMware’s efforts to improve the operational model of networking and maximize the value of customer deployments.” – Jim Ritchings, senior vice president, worldwide channels and alliances organization, F5. Read F5’s Announcement

“Historically, security controls were required to be directly in the path of affected communication flow. Our VMware integration allows for a much less intrusive design and enables dynamic policy control. Today’s demonstration enhances our already mature unified threat management VM product line and gives our customers yet another choice regarding how they want to deploy security for cloud and software defined data center architectures. As more customers virtualize the cloud network with the new VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform, we will provide holistic security across virtual and physical infrastructures.” – Elie Bitton, senior director, product management-virtualization, Fortinet. Read Fortinet’s Announcement

“Networks must be agile enough to enable the adoption of cloud and mobility while ensuring continuity. Building upon our SDN leadership, the HP-VMware networking solution unifies visibility and automation of the physical and virtual network with a common control plane, enabling new application and service delivery in minutes rather than months.” – Bethany Mayer, senior vice president and general manager, Networking, HP. Read HP’s Announcement

“VMware’s expertise in virtualization coupled with Juniper’s leadership in networking represents a very powerful combination that delivers agile solutions for the software-defined data center. SDN allows customers to derive increased value from their networks through virtualization and gain more intelligence via analytics and advanced orchestration capabilities. Working together, both companies are jointly committed to delivering simple, flexible solutions that enable enterprise customers to unify their virtual and physical network environments to achieve greater business agility.” – Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president, Campus and Data Center Business Unit, Juniper Networks. Read Juniper’s Announcement

“McAfee is pleased to support the VMware NSX™ network virtualization and security platform with our Network Security Platform. The integration between the McAfee Network Security Platform and VMware NSX will address automation and orchestration requirements that arise in software defined datacenters. Customers will be able to automatically deploy security and dynamically enforce protection in these environments.” – Vinay Anand, vice president of product management for network security, McAfee. Read McAfee’s Announcement.

“In order to truly unlock the potential of the software defined data center, organizations must be able to accelerate deployment of business critical applications with transparent security enforcement and the best protection possible.  The combination of VMware NSX and the Palo Alto Networks next-generation security platform allows customers to realize a streamlined and highly secure cloud experience.” – Lee Klarich, senior vice president of product management, Palo Alto Networks. Read Palo Alto’s Announcement

“Radware was among the firsts to embrace virtualization inside-out in our application delivery and application security offerings.  As customers deploy VMware NSX, we will enable them to tightly manage service assurance levels and guarantee quality of experience for their mission and performance critical applications running across both virtual and physical networks. VMware NSX enables customers to deploy their applications anywhere, scale them out anywhere and move them anywhere dynamically and programmatically. Radware load-balancing and application delivery services continuously and automatically guarantees quality of experience for these workloads across NSX virtual networks. Together this provides both operational efficiency and service level assurance.” – Gilad Zlotkin, Vice President of Virtualization and Cloud, Radware, Ltd.

“In today’s world of complex network-based threats, the ability for enterprises to leverage networking advancements like VMware NSX, while at the same time providing organizations real-time visibility into risk in virtual networks, is key. Through this alliance with VMware, Rapid7 is the first company to offer vulnerability management with the NSX platform. This provides fast and accurate vulnerability scans, while at the same time reducing setup and management overhead to better meet the security and compliance needs of our customers.” – Lee Weiner, senior vice president of products & engineering, Rapid7

“Riverbed and VMware have a history of collaboration for the benefit of our mutual customers. As customers are making the move towards the software-defined data center, we are working together to ensure customers are able to move their critical data and virtual machines cost efficiently without sacrificing performance or the end-user experience.  Riverbed has been working closely with VMware to embed our market-leading WAN optimization solution into the VMware NSX™ network virtualization and security platform, enabling customers to automate the deployment of their Riverbed WAN optimization and direct traffic to Steelhead appliances in a secure and standardized fashion using the same VMware tools that they use to manage their virtual environment.” – Jess Leroy, Vice President of Product Management, Riverbed

“While the benefits of scale and efficiency of virtualized networks can extend throughout an organization, it should and can have the same, if not a better level of security and oversight as physical infrastructures. Combining the VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform with the RSA® Security Analytics solution offers the best of both worlds.  It will enable our customers to gain total visibility, unique context, and the analytics necessary to pinpoint the faint signals of an attack anywhere in the physical or virtual infrastructure.” –Tom Corn, SVP, Chief Strategy Officer, RSA, The Security Division of EMC

“The network has historically been a barrier to achieving the full benefits of virtualization and workload mobility because of complex physical network topology, manual configuration of network equipment, and a reliance on vendor-specific expertise. Silver Peak Agility combined with VMware NSX™ can help overcome these challenges by enabling rapid, on-demand deployment of network services in the software-defined data center.” – David Hughes, CEO, Silver Peak. Read Silver Peak’s Announcement

“Symantec is committed to our strategic partnership with VMware, and continues to build on our strategy to protect information wherever it resides. NSX will enable customers to seamlessly deploy Symantec’s market-leading security and threat prevention technologies through the software defined data center, allowing them to increase IT efficiencies, streamline operations, and drive their business forward with confidence.” –Shantanu Ghosh, vice president of the Data Center Security Group, Symantec

“As VMware launches its next-generation VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform, Trend Micro is excited to work alongside to create a comprehensive security backbone that protects the data center of the future. This relationship will help simplify and automate how security is deployed, delivering reliable protection that easily scales to the needs of each customer.” – Kevin Simzer, senior vice president, marketing and business development, Trend Micro. Read Trend Micro’s Announcement

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